Recently, devices for compressing and encoding an image by adopting an encoding scheme of handling image information digitally and performing compression by an orthogonal transform such as a discrete cosine transform and motion compensation using image information-specific redundancy for the purpose of information transmission and accumulation with high efficiency when the image information is handled digitally have become widespread. Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), H.264, MPEG-4 Part 10 (Advanced Video Coding) (hereinafter referred to as H.264/AVC), and the like are examples of such encoding schemes.
Therefore, for the purpose of improving encoding efficiency compared to H.264/AVC, standardization of an encoding scheme referred to as high efficiency video coding (HEVC) by Joint Collaboration Team-Video Coding (JCTVC), which is a joint standardizing organization of International Telecommunication Union Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) and International Organization for Standardization (ISO)/International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), is currently in progress (for example, see Non-Patent Literature 1).
In the draft of HEVC at the present time, a dependent slice is adopted as one parallel processing tool. Parallel decoding of picture units of each view using the dependent slice is possible.